Travel with your children, not against them.

February 15, 2008

Comparing Five Free Road Trip Planners

On a recent car trip from Chicago to St. Louis with TJ, I discovered that car travel with children is measured in dog years; your trip feels seven times as long as it actually is. Which is why our five-hour jaunt felt more like a day and a half. Which is also why I'm game for any tool that will make future road trips go more smoothly. With that in mind, I tested out five free road trip planners. I used a hypothetical trip from Chicago, over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house in New York. Here's my road trip planner review, with each service receiving a rating of one to five Elmo DVDs (), because that's what brings us peace in the car:

Freetrip.com: Freetrip.com got off to a bad start, as it appears to provide only city-to-city directions, rather than address-to-address. While I'm sure you know how to get to all major highways from your house, you might not know how to get to your destination's exact address. Also, while Freetrip.com provided a few nice bells and whistles, like providing links to hotels in a pre-selected price range at each point in your trip, if you wanted more detailed information like restaurants, gas stations, or parks, you had to join the "inside track club" at $19.95 per year. Although the paid product might be fantastic (admittedly, I didn't shell out the 20 bucks to find out), in my opinion road trip planners and velvet-roped VIP sections don't mix. Especially a road trip planner called "free trip." Rating: **ADDENDUM** (3/12/08): I revisited the Freetrip site on 3/12/08 and it appears there have been some significant (in a good way) changes from the time I originally test drove it. Users of the free program now have the ability to search for not only hotels along their journey, but also gas stations and national parks. You wouldn't think a national parks finder would be that handy, but 16 different national parks popped up on my Chicago-to-New York route, along with a nice link to the official website for each. What's more, if you click on the red car icon next to any particular attraction, Freetrip will automatically recalculate your route to include your new fun-time detour. As for the gas stations, Freetrip's website indicates that it's "planning to launch a discount fuel card for use at thousands of Truck Stops across the USA," which would be a great development in this age of $3 gas. So, it looks like Freetrip.com merits a serious Elmo upgrade. Revised rating:

AAA Trip Tik Travel Planner: Anyone remember the pre-internet dark ages, when the best road trip tool you could get was the hard-copy AAA Trip Tik, where you flipped pages over like a spiral notepad until arriving at your destination? Well, now there's a slightly less bulky Internet version. AAA Trip Tik gives you free point-to-point driving directions. Then you can zoom in on the map at any point of your trip to click on details for lodging, restaurants, gas stations, attractions, construction information, and more. Once you locate a potential restaurant or hotel, you can then click to receive detailed info on the food it serves, or hotel amenities. Granted, they're not critical reviews but rather ads by the establishments; but it beats the days of pulling off the road and saying, "I don't think anyone's ever died in that place, let's give it a shot." For example, if we decided to stop in Clearfield, Pennsylvania to break up the trip, we learned we could stay at a Holiday Inn Express, dine at Denny's Beer Barrel Pub (which AAA tells you is home of the "gut-busting" 6-pound burger), and visit the Grace Clearfield Community Museum. Now there's a rest stop. The only con I found with Trip Tik: you can easily lose your place zooming in and out of the map to focus on select destinations, which is the only way to discover the various gas, food, lodging, and culture along the way. A minor complaint, really. Rating:

Mapquest: Often a gold standard for point-to-point directions, Mapquest unfortunately offers little else for road trip planners. You can plug in multiple stops, or do a separate search to chart out the lowest gas prices along your route, but Mapquest doesn't offer anything in its trip planner regarding lodging, food or attractions. If you just need directions, Mapquest works fine. If you're looking to stop and smell the local attractions along the way, look elsewhere. Rating:

Rand McNally TripMaker: Rand McNally offers great point-by-point directions and some nice added features, with two caveats. One feature missing from TripMaker is the ability to search for restaurants along your route. Anyone who's been on a road trip knows that food stops, especially those with local flavor, are a key road trip component. So, TripMaker gets a one-Elmo demerit from my stomach. Second, although TripMaker offers searches for categories like "fun and games", "arts and culture", and "local highlights" as well as hotels (through a kayak.com link), it offers this information only for your starting point, final destination, and any stops you pre-program along the way. Not a big deal, as most road trippers probably have an idea of where they plan to stop. But, since it's not as flexible as AAA's TripTik, we'll charge them another Elmo. Lastly, the first question TripMaker asks you is whether you're traveling with kids. I think this is great, except I can't figure out what difference answering "yes" means for the results given. Maybe they're just making conversation. Rating:

ETravelougue.com Road Trip Itinerary Planner: ETravelouge's road trip planner seems great in theory, somewhat less great in practice. For example, you can choose to receive information on more than 25 categories along your route, from roadside attractions to restaurants to hotels to sports acitivities. There was even a "family/tourist fun" category. You can also choose how far off your route you're willing to go for these attractions; another great idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like ETravelouge has collected much information yet, however. My search for "family fun" stops within ten miles of our Chicago to New York route yielded one result: The Historic Speedwell in Morristown New Jersey. And the link for that was broken. Likewise, my searches didn't turn up a single roadside attraction or restaurant within ten miles of my route, which leads me to think that the data just hasn't been input yet. If that's not the case, I may open up a museum/diner about halfway between New York and Chicago and really clean up. On the plus side, ETravelougue certainly has its hotel data in place. More than 10 pages of hotel choices popped up along my route. Unfortunately, the only information provided for each specific hotel is a name and address, but it's something. So, ETravelogue looks like it's got the mechanics in place to be a very helpful, but now just needs to collect the information it's capable of providing. Rating: